“We were very lucky in this instance,” Plainfield Fire Chief David Riddle said. “There was no fire, nobody got hurt by the grace of God.”
As the residents of Lac-Megantic were preparing to acknowledge the 4th anniversary of the oil train disaster that leveled and poisoned their downtown and killed 47 people, residents of Plainfield, Illinois were happy to just be complaining about the odor of spilled oil after a train pulling 115 tank cars of Canadian crude oil derailed near their neighborhood.
According to media reports 20 of the tank cars derailed with at least two punctured, resulting in an oil spill of approximately 40,000 gallons. Ironically the local river may have been protected thanks to the continued expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure in America. The majority of the oil ended up in a ditch near the tracks destined for a new natural gas pipeline.
This latest lucky break comes just over a year after DeSmog published an article titled “Luck Rides the Rails” about the oil train derailment, spill and fire in Mosier, Oregon in which we detailed the numerous close calls that have occurred with oil train derailments.
